NCAA coaches continue their education

Ok, now NCAA coaches won't have any excuses or reasons to complain about the way the NCAA women's basketball pairings are set up this season.

Geno Auriemma and Jen Rizzotti were two of 18 current head basketball coaches invited by the NCAA Division I Women's Basketball group to participate in a mock women's basketball tournament selection at the NCAA national office today and Friday.

The two-day exercise gives participants a taste of the nearly week-long process the Division I Women's Basketball Committee goes through annually when selecting, seeding and bracketing 64 teams for the NCAA Division I Women's Basketball championship.

The mock selection committee had access to all the tools (game results, RPI calculations, etc.) and followed the same principles and procedures the actual committee follows when it assembles the championship bracket each March.

This is the first time the mock committee consisted entirely of coaches and Women's Basketball Coaches Association (WBCA) administrators.

Four active coaches (Coale, Bruno, Muffet McGraw of Notre Dame and Gary Blair of Texas A&M) attended a mock selection exercise last February. Based on the feedback from that exercise, the WBCA and the NCAA women's basketball staff collaborated to coordinate the summer session.

"The committee has always felt the value of adding transparency to the process," said Jane Meyer, incoming chair of the NCAA Division I Women's Basketball Committee and senior associate director of athletics at Iowa.

Meyer said coaches who have attended past mock selections have typically come away with a new perspective on what it means to be a committee member.

"This exercise shows them that selection is based upon an extensive array of factors, and the committee has much data at its disposal as part of the decision-making process," Meyer said. "The process has many layers, but in the end, it identifies those teams deserving to be included in the field of 64."

This mock selection posed a different challenge since participants already know how the 2008-09 season finished. With this in mind, they were asked to base their discussions on the results from the 2008-09 regular season and 2009 conference tournaments.

Both the Division I men's basketball staff and the women's staff began conducting mock selections with national print and electronic media members in 2007 in an attempt to clarify the process that the 10-person men's and women's basketball committees experience each March when the championship brackets are constructed and announced.

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2 Comments

I am surprised that they didn't invite Tara V. since she has had one of the most legitimate beefs with the committee the past two years. Stanford could win the WBNA's Western Conference and get a two seed. Which reminds me of a question about last year's NCAA tournament, has UCONN received the Pac-10 championship trophy yet?

I pick on the WNBA today for spelling Asjha's name wrong and I spell "WBNA". As a result, I am imposing a two-day posting suspension upon myself for typing detrimental to this blog. I am sure the league will not think further punishment is necessary.